Thursday, 13 March 2014

With almost the entire nation getting ready to implement the Common Core State Standards, is a thorough revolution that the educators are going through. The school administrations have not remained static either. With the latest outcome of PISA results and unfolding of The Condition of College & Career Readiness 2013 it is very clear that American school administrations have an excellent opportunity to implement the best international educational policies. Here is a list of the top 10 best educational policies across the globe. American schools can comply with these policies to showcase their unbeatable valor on international platforms.
The constant average performance of the American students in the Program for International Student Assessment over the past ten years clearly indicates the stagnancy that has set in our education system. While China dominates the results in all three categories of Math, science and reading, the results of the American teens continue to remain gloomy. If we want the American students to be globally competitive, it is high time that we look at the best educational practices being observed by other top-performing nations.
We bring to you the top 10 education practices that the best-ranked nations employ to deliver the most effective results. Let us gear up and be the unbeatable educators that the entire world would look up to.

Educating Core Value And Application: Are we making Dumbies who know the price of everything and the value of nothing? Of all ACT tested high school graduates, 56 percent of the students failed to touch the mathematics standard. College Readiness Benchmark data is based on the ACT Profile Report—National: Graduating Class 2013. As per Andreas Schleicher, the special OECD advisor for education policy at CNN, simply 2 percent of the American students can infer the use of math creatively. The same ratio for Shanghai, China is over 30 percent. We need to make our students learn to conceptualize and to apply advance math and science to practical use. They need to learn to be creative with math and science to be globally competitive citizens.

Research, Prepare, And Give Kids A Break: In the US, the number of hours a student is educated is 1080 hours per year while in Finland (the nation that tops the education quality assessment by Pearson) the students are taught for just 600 hours in a year. Do the schools not function for the remaining days? – The remaining hours are given to the teachers to prepare the lesson plans, do further research work and enhance and get better.While the US students are entitled to just two breaks per year, the students of New Zealand get two-week break in four terms per year. They also take 40 days break during summer. By classifying the breaks as per student’s needs they give a balanced opportunity to the students to retain the information that is taught, to relax, and even to organize their knowledge that they acquire.

Valuing Education: While the US devotes just 2 percent of its national earnings towards betterment of education - China, (the second best scorer of PISA results) devotes 20 percent of its national revenue for betterment of education. This surplus amount even enables them to pay the educators better than what the engineers and lawyers are paid. We need to understand that we must cultivate a culture of valuing education as well as the educators.

The Classroom Atmosphere: Every year the child gets new teachers and a few new classmates too. In Finland, one of the unwavering top-performing nation on the list of PISA test results, the students get promoted along with the teacher. Thus, the same set of students educate with the same teacher year on year. Child psychologists believe that the same atmosphere gives students a more secured atmosphere. This helps them feel at home and concentrate better. On the other hand, the teacher too is familiar with all the strong and weak points of each student and can draft strategies to make them understand in a far more efficient manner.

The Pay scales: The efficiently skilled professionals choose professions that would pay them their worth. When the educators are paid an average starting annual salary of $ 39,000 the message is clear for all the efficient people to look for some other profession and not be a teacher in the US. South Korea, Finland, and Singapore all have much better salary structure and graders for teachers than the US does. With the right amount of income, the teachers remain dedicated to their profession for a long duration and take their profession seriously.

Team up and progress: The stronger and better performers should help the schools that are not doing so well. Though the school district formula does its job yet, there are schools that perform better than the school districts. Shouldn’t performance be the selection criterion than the size? Shanghai has an initiative know as “empowered administration”. Under this theme, the better performing schools pair up with the less-performing schools to help them do better. The experienced administrators share their experiences and line up the best strategies that deliver the required results.

Nurturing the Core Senses: In a survey where 84 percent of the Japanese students declared that they had faith that they have what it takes to succeed and were willing to do whatever it takes to be achievers, just fifty percent of the US students felt the same. The core sense of determination and dedication for achieving whatever is desired needs to be nurtured in American students. The common US belief that intelligence is in your DNA needs alteration.

Capping The Class: There are no restrictions on the number of students in the US classroom, and even 40 students can be placed in a class with a particular teacher, it most certainly is not a healthy practice. The more the number of the students, the lesser would be the amount of individual attention each student gets from the teacher. The Nova Scotia recently declared a cap of 25 students per class w.e.f. 2014.

Parents & Quality Education: The parents too need to be involved in the education of the child in true sense. The parents need to be educated about how they must construct the learning abilities of their children. The emphasis has to be on the effort that the child makes and not on his capability. The parents must nurture the dedication and determination of the child as well. All the Asian nations including China ensure that that the focus is on child’s efforts and not on his ability.

Developing A Healthy Relationship: The parents and teachers both hold an equal amount of importance in a child’s overall development. There should be an effortless positivism between the teacher and student. The overall school attendance of an average American student is 92 percent while that of a Japanese student is 99.98 percent. As the parents need to be more actively involved in the education of the child, the teacher too needs to be a part of the overall development of the child and must be more involved in their personal lives. This would bring them closer and would help develop an absolute positive relationship between the teacher, the student, and the parents.

Finally, the most important thing that the overall education system of America including the education administrators and government needs to understand is that “We need to value education and educators from the core and not just common core.”

Tuesday, 21 January 2014

With the temperature waning to as low as minus 23 degrees or shrink beyond 25 degrees below the average temperatures, it is time to cuddle your children and spend some good quality time with them. In Oklahoma, the schools were closed and even some of the businesses closed their offices considering the safety of their employees. While you survive one of the coldest winters, something that has not been experienced over past 10 years, would it be advisable to drive your children to the activity centers or the nearby learning centers?

If you feel that your child's future is your top most concern, well, here is a God sent opportunity that you can actually convert into a once in a lifetime experience. Wondering how would you do that?

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Here are a few key facts about learning math and how learning math online is more practical than the traditional classroom math education:

The present day global standardized test scores prove that American students are not ready to compete on the global platform and one of the main reasons for the same is the lack of math skills.

There is a fundamental lack of math teachers all across the nation.

The adults competing for their careers find lack of math skills as a top most hindrance factor.

Math education is facing absolute crisis on multiple levels in teaching as well as learning segments.

Basic math fundamentals cannot and will not change, however, the traditional methods to teach math must change if we have to provide better understanding and skills to our students.

The universities that implement math learning online attract more students who are adults and struggling for brighter career opportunities.

Almost all technology critics agree that online learning is shaping the future of teaching and learning for good.

With experiments conducted using traditional learning and online learning, conclusions are that online learning imparts better perspective and gives deeper and clear understanding of the concepts.

As online math involves real time dynamic examples, (change of shapes, figures, variables, angles, etc) students find it to be fun while they actually learn. The little challenges that adaptive learning platforms bring in between the tutorials, challenge the students' minds for deeper contemplation.

Another experiment was conducted to observe if learning math online did improve the skill set of the students. It was concluded that the students from traditional learning class and online learners both groups did equally well with easy math problems. However, when the students were given more complex and tough problems, the group of online math learners performed extensively better than the students who were taught in a traditional classroom.

The visual evidence that provides more scope to find how concepts work is practically impossible in a traditional classroom.

A few more advantages that interactive learning has over traditional learning are:

It is based on student's individual capability

It gives student the authority to pace his learning

It does not get frustrated while explaining the same concept over and over till the student feels perfectly conversant with it (is virtually unlimited)

It keeps students attentive, curious and interested in math

It gives instant and personalized feedbacks and encouragements

Apart from the advantages mentioned above, we are certain that though the traditional methods has been developed after years of hard work and research, they do not match up the present day challenges.

The world has become a global village that has abundance of resources available right at your fingertips.
Can you possibly do justice to your children by depriving them the whole bunch of goodness that adaptive learning provides?

Can you afford to keep your children acquainted to the only traditional coaching when the rest of the world marches ahead towards a glorious tomorrow by embracing the blessings of the modern day technology?
Of course, you must spend some quality time with your children having fun while they learn. Will it not be kind of awesome to cuddle him, hold his hand, and lead him to learn (while you can still smell his hair)?Yes, with such fabulous advantages of learning Math online, who knows you might just encourage your child to fall in love with Math and be a mathematician, Amen!About PracTutorPracTutor is a customized learning and practice environment to help students in Grades 1 to 8 master Math and English. We provide 1-to-1 mentoring for each student. We make the learning fun by introducing gamification and help parents and teachers track progress and get alerts whenever they need help.